James Thomas Rook Jr.

Sorry Tom that was tooooooooooooooooooooo long. I read half but you do go on a bit
What i did notice was the same old collateral damage thing.  
Quote " It is but a component of the big picture, overall a very small one." 
It's only SMALL  to you and others that are not interested in those that have suffered.
Seems to be the American way of life. War or religion, collateral damage. No love, no respect, survival of the mentally fittest. 
That's not Spiritual Wisdom Tom, it's not caring for widows and orphans, it's not being being a crag or rock as the Org should be. 
I'll try to read the rest later after my walk in the woods. Have a good day opponent not enemy  .
As for this Tom, you are totally wrong,  Quote "Time heals most everything that wants to be healed."
You honestly do not understand, we don't have a choice but to remember those things. 
 

I am inclined to adopt the philosophy of Tarzan of the Apes, on vigilante justice.   One night Tarzan was perched in a tree, watching a tribe below, and one man was awake,  tending a giant stew pot that was cooking the bodies of a neighboring tribe that had lost a battle, and Tarzan drops silently to the ground, and from behind lifts the cook by his ankles and sticks his head in the boiling stew, and pushes him in.
Although Jehovah God has never expressed any prohibition against cannibalism,  Tarzan reasoned that  even Great Apes (his family) did not eat each other, and neither should men.  He obeyed the dictates of his NATURAL conscience, as created by author Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The idea of taking someone back to "white man's justice". was totally foreign to Tarzan.
Perhaps that is why the Society discourages education and reading anything other than it's own publications.
Yet, on reflection, many, many dozens of times I have refrained from killing someone who SERIOUSLY needed killin'.
I wonder if that makes me "more theocratic" ... or just a wimp.

I am inclined to adopt the philosophy of Tarzan of the Apes, on vigilante justice.   One night Tarzan was perched in a tree, watching a tribe below, and one man was awake,  tending a giant stew pot that was cooking the bodies of a neighboring tribe that had lost a battle, and Tarzan drops silently to the ground, and from behind lifts the cook by his ankles and sticks his head in the boiling stew, and pushes him in.
Although Jehovah God has never expressed any prohibition against cannibalism,  Tarzan reasoned that  even Great Apes (his family) did not eat each other, and neither should men.  He obeyed the dictates of his NATURAL conscience, as created by author Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The idea of taking someone back to "white man's justice". was totally foreign to Tarzan.
Perhaps that is why the Society discourages education and reading anything other than it's own publications.
Yet, on reflection, many, many dozens of times I have refrained from killing someone who SERIOUSLY needed killin'.
I wonder if that makes me "more theocratic" ... or just a wimp.

I am inclined to adopt the philosophy of Tarzan of the Apes, on vigilante justice.   One night Tarzan was perched in a tree, watching a tribe below, and one man was awake,  tending a giant stew pot that was cooking the bodies of a neighboring tribe that had lost a battle, and Tarzan drops silently to the ground, and from behind lifts the cook by his ankles and sticks his head in the boiling stew, and pushes him in.
Although Jehovah God has never expressed any prohibition against cannibalism,  Tarzan reasoned that  even Great Apes (his family) did not eat each other, and neither should men.  He obeyed the dictates of his NATURAL conscience, as created by author Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The idea of taking someone back to "white man's justice". was totally foreign to Tarzan.
Perhaps that is why the Society discourages education and reading anything other than it's own publications.
Yet, on reflection, many, many dozens of times I have refrained from killing someone who SERIOUSLY needed killin'.
I wonder if that makes me "more theocratic" ... or just a wimp.

The most methane produced on Earth is by Volcanoes, which seem to not to want to cooperate with the people brokering and selling Carbon Credits, to promote Socialism through equalizing money throughout the Earth ... minus their 15% commissions, of course, like the companies Al Gore created to do exactly that .... and the second highest methane producers are Chinese rice paddies.
None of which matters, because we live in an atmosphere that is about 21% Oxygen, 78% Nitrogen, and 1% other gasses, which are totally irrelevant ... including methane. 
The ONLY real "greenhouse gas" is  plain old WATER VAPOR .... big mile deep clouds ... shiny on the top ... dark on the bottom .... like a giant floating space age blanket.  The more clouds you have in the daytime the cooler it is.  The more clouds you have in the night time, the warmer it is.
Between belching and farting that's how cows tell jokes, in Stereo.
Then ... I close my bathroom window.

I’m on it. Thanks for the tip.

Jane Spillane
Mickey’s wife.
okay, okay, so it is only through social media.
I wrote a Mickey Spillane summit parody for Jane Spillane, who is re-releasing the Mike Hammer tough-guy series of late 1940's private eye books. It is a spoof on what if the President had handled Putin like Mike Hammer might handle a crime boss. She loved it. She said so on my FB and Twitter feed.   Mickey Spillane later became one of Jehovah's Witnesses and his work changed a lot. That triggered my interest in his books. Now, Jane is not a Witness, probably has mixed feelings about them at best, and may feel they were responsible for 'sabatoging' his work, since his post-JW writings lose the excess sex and violence and thereby become less of what Mickey himself once said about Hemingway and the highbrow authors: "What those guys could never get is that you sell a lot more salted peanuts than cavier."   Since the violence and sex is excessive in his early days, it is easy to dismiss the novels as so much garbage. However, as to the writing itself, Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) lavished high praise on them and compared them favorably to some elite authors of the day. Mickey's own dad, I think he was a bartender, called his writing "crud." Ayn Rand did not feel that way.   Atlantic Magazine (I think it was) interviewed him in later years ('I may write one more Mike Hammer, but that's it. I can't sit eight hours in a chair anymore. My rear end gets sore.') and pointed out that his latter books were winning some critical acclaim. "To Mickey's disgust, one suspects," the author adds. Come on! It is impossible not to love this guy. He had the combination of intense interest, yes, even love, of people, coupled with an absolute lack of pretence, and a willingness to go 'in your face,' traits that were a trademark of Jehovah’s Witnesses of a certain generation.   The parody follows:   Mickey Potus strode into the room and eyed his enemy. The crime boss was not so impressive in person as when he was pretending to be a tough guy on horseback. He sat in his tailored silk suit, hoping to bluster, trying to look like he didn’t have a care in the world, but Mickey knew his entrance had shaken him to the core. The puddle of piss on the floor gave him away, That often happened when Mickey came calling.
Mickey decided to play with this piece of human scum for a while. Real casual-like, he said to Vicious Vlad, “Let me tell you about a friend of mine, a knockout woman name Velda.” A bead of sweat broke out on Vlad’s brow. Maybe he had heard. Maybe he knew the game was up.
“My friend Velda, she’s got intelligence, you know what I mean? She’s got real intelligence. She has more intelligence in her little finger than you have in your whole nation of goons. And Velda tells me….,” Mickey stopped dead, so that next words he said would hit the little punk with the force of a sledge hammer. Velda tells me that – you’ve – been – meddling – in – our – election.” That hit home. The little man shook.
Mickey grabbed the punk by the lapels. “Now you listen up and you listen up good. Cut it out!” But Vlad was too much of a stool pigeon to know when to cut his losses. He voice trembled, but he tried to stammer back: “We didn’t me-me-medd….” He never got the words out. A smashing blow from Mickey’s fist sent blood and teeth flying everywhere.
“I said ‘cut it out’” Mickey roared. What! You think I’m taking the word of scum over my intelligence? I checked out that floozie you were with and I’m not impressed. She can’t hold a candle to my Velda, a real class act, and one of these books I’m going to marry her. There won’t be any hanky-panky beforehand either. I’m kinda an old-fashioned type of guy.”
“Now I’ve got one and only one question for you,” Mickey glowered. The little man, real cooperative all of a sudden, all the fight out of him, quavered, “Wh-What?”
“Why don’t you get me a cup of coffee?” [it is what Mickey said to Jane during HIS interview when she began to hog it (in his estimation): “Honey, can I ask you a question?”]

My contribution to "Global Warming" is limited to accidentally leaving my bathroom window open.
 
REMEMBER !   Every home, office, factory and other building that is heated ... every single one ..... without exception ... eventually loses that heat from the inside, to the outside.  Think of 5 BILLION hot spots on the Earth, sucking up natural gas, oil, electricity, propane, coal and uranium, and turning it into HEAT!
Even in the summer, air conditioners pump HEAT to the outside air.
 
Now that you are excited, and hyper-ventilating in an ecological save the planet or we are all doomed panic ....  what does that mean as a practical, real life matter?
 
Absolutely NOTHING!
 
 

My contribution to "Global Warming" is limited to accidentally leaving my bathroom window open.
 
REMEMBER !   Every home, office, factory and other building that is heated ... every single one ..... without exception ... eventually loses that heat from the inside, to the outside.  Think of 5 BILLION hot spots on the Earth, sucking up natural gas, oil, electricity, propane, coal and uranium, and turning it into HEAT!
Even in the summer, air conditioners pump HEAT to the outside air.
 
Now that you are excited, and hyper-ventilating in an ecological save the planet or we are all doomed panic ....  what does that mean as a practical, real life matter?
 
Absolutely NOTHING!
 
 

Yes. And I don't know if you noticed, in that book extract, Gabriele Yonan states: " When the entire text of the Declaration of 25 June 1933 and the letter to Hitler are seen today in the context of the history of Jehovah's Witnesses during the period of National Socialism in Germany and the history of their religious resistance and their stand during the Holocaust, then the text does not present itself as an "antisemitic statement" or an attempt at "currying the favor" of Hitler. These accusations, stemming from present-day church circles, are deliberate manipulations and falsifications of history, seemingly motivated by guilt over the churches' own involvement or lack or involvement in the persecutions.
So active haters like Lloyd Evans are merely piggy backing on the Churches reasons for criticizing Rutherford's letter. They do not have their own original criticism. This is hilarious since LE is an atheist, but as you see, when it comes to being hateful about JW org, he has no qualms about being one with Christendom. But that is to be expected.

That is an EXTREMELY good example .... that fact rock solid hard evidence, not agenda based fluffery and fuzzy thinking!
I am as critical of all the crap going on as anybody here is ... and probably know as much or more than most well educated people about such things .... but I have learned through interactions with MANY kinds of "organizations", not to expect too much from people in groups.
The example I most often recall to mind is this:
If you understand the Mission of the United States Marines, and their necessity in the real world to defend what is honorable, true and righteous ( ... in a very limited absolute sense ...), then for some, that mission was what you were born to do .... be a "Sheepdog", with fangs and claws ... to be the "point of the spear", to protect your fellow sheep ... who are many times scared of you.
It entails willingness to die, or live the rest of your life mangled and broken.  That's what the job IS.
But as the "Peter Principle", a VERY famous business principle states (paraphrased) "Everyone rises in rank to their own level of incompetency".
You could be a very good Marine Sargent, and rise to be an incompetent Marine Lieutenant, etc., ad infinitum. 
A committee is a peculiar life form with at least six legs, and no brain.
This is ESPECIALLY true in fuzzy subjects such as Theology, where everyone is jousting for favor and position with God, and gets used to great piles of free money .... considering it their due.
The Governing Body is NOT the exception, and they have 16 legs.
This is ESPECIALLY true with anyone claiming to speak for God, whether it is kissing the Pope's ring, or admiring the Governing Body's Rolex watches and gold pinkie rings.
When you begin to live like Kings, that vow of poverty becomes irrelevant.
That  bears repeating, over and over ... as there is a VERY important core principle embedded in that innocuous  rock solid and true observation.
I personally fully understand that, and though I sigh and cry over all the unnecessary burdens and smelly crap we have to carry ... that I personally have been expected to carry over the years ... and silly irrelevant drivel we are expected to swallow, hook-line-and-sinker ... I still want to be a "Marine" .... just not an Officer.
The biggest problem we have ... is HAVING to recruit from deeply flawed but presumably well intentioned humans.
.... sigh.
... so does the United States Marines ... and THEY have rifles.

It would have to be a small star sized chunk of iron .... probably not something you could get at an automobile scrap yard.
Further, when a star collapses, it can go Nova, or Supernova, which is how we get elements heavier than iron.  This is the natural life cycles of Stars, and there is NOTHING we can to to speed it up, slow it down, or ANYTHING ... except watch.
I suspect in the New System, with perfect people, and 10,000 years of scientific advancement, this will STILL be true.
Same with "Climate Change", AKA "Global Warming.
There is nothing we can do except watch .....
and perhaps move to the mountains, or buy a boat.

Billy ... climate change may contribute to accelerated erosion ..... but accelerated erosion DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO CLIMATE CHANGE.
"Everybody says" that because the CO2 levels are rising, the earth is getting warmer.
THEY ARE WRONG
The Earth is getting warmer because it is a natural cycle, due to orbital mechanics of our planet, and the variability of our Star, the Sun.
BECAUSE it is getting warmer, bacteria is flourishing  more than when it is cooler.
Bacteria exhale CO2, just as we do.  Then the trees use CO2, strip off the carbon to make wood, and exhale oxygen.
You are fixated on erosion.
There is an expression for this phenomena of perspective.
"When you are a hammer ... EVERYTHING looks like a nail."
 

It would have to be a small star sized chunk of iron .... probably not something you could get at an automobile scrap yard.
Further, when a star collapses, it can go Nova, or Supernova, which is how we get elements heavier than iron.  This is the natural life cycles of Stars, and there is NOTHING we can to to speed it up, slow it down, or ANYTHING ... except watch.
I suspect in the New System, with perfect people, and 10,000 years of scientific advancement, this will STILL be true.
Same with "Climate Change", AKA "Global Warming.
There is nothing we can do except watch .....
and perhaps move to the mountains, or buy a boat.

Billy ... climate change may contribute to accelerated erosion ..... but accelerated erosion DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO CLIMATE CHANGE.
"Everybody says" that because the CO2 levels are rising, the earth is getting warmer.
THEY ARE WRONG
The Earth is getting warmer because it is a natural cycle, due to orbital mechanics of our planet, and the variability of our Star, the Sun.
BECAUSE it is getting warmer, bacteria is flourishing  more than when it is cooler.
Bacteria exhale CO2, just as we do.  Then the trees use CO2, strip off the carbon to make wood, and exhale oxygen.
You are fixated on erosion.
There is an expression for this phenomena of perspective.
"When you are a hammer ... EVERYTHING looks like a nail."
 

It would have to be a small star sized chunk of iron .... probably not something you could get at an automobile scrap yard.
Further, when a star collapses, it can go Nova, or Supernova, which is how we get elements heavier than iron.  This is the natural life cycles of Stars, and there is NOTHING we can to to speed it up, slow it down, or ANYTHING ... except watch.
I suspect in the New System, with perfect people, and 10,000 years of scientific advancement, this will STILL be true.
Same with "Climate Change", AKA "Global Warming.
There is nothing we can do except watch .....
and perhaps move to the mountains, or buy a boat.

I think it can be misleading to look at the ability of the atmosphere to absorb billions of tons of elements in the form of gases and particulates outside of the "normal" levels of Carbon Dioxide, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Dihydrogen Monoxide 😉, Methane, Ozone, etc. But the theory of global warming is really about "tipping points." It's not "linear." The atmosphere can absorb tons of "pollutants, but only up to a certain point when new effects can be measured.
It's also an attempt to explain why we have been able to measure the gasses trapped in ice for thousands of years based on deep core samples and see a very stable rise and fall in "greenhouse gases" up until the last few decades. These are evidently natural cycles. You can think of distortion, interference or spikes in an otherwise smooth sine wave on an oscilloscope. These "spikes" could be from oceanic or volcanic disruptions over the last thousands of years, and we can't really correlate these with global temperatures since there was no one there to measure prior to the last few decades. So the threshold line is theoretically arbitrary. Still, if we could hypothesize a "tipping point" threshold line, it's easy to see that spikes that occur below the threshold line would be meaningless. But to test the theory we would want to watch for possible additional effects over the line. But now we have a new spike that hasn't abated, and it's 10 times taller than the last spike on the chart below (not shown).
Why a huge spike now? Is there more volcanic activity now? NO. Is there more methane and CO2  released now? YES. So this is where and why we would start looking for cause and effect.

It's not fully analogous, but some TV Science channel once ran a special about how you could kill the Sun with a chunk of iron. Completely false, but it turns out that there are stars of certain sizes that would not survive an influx of iron. More accurately, stars fuse hydrogen to helium -- and the core of the star, through real alchemy, can "fuse" elements all the way up to iron, but no further. If it starts trying to fuse iron, it means its energy will quickly be lost and the star will quickly collapse. The point is that it might be surprising that a star (depending on mass/gravity) that has a certain level of iron in it could be fine, but just a tiny bit more and the whole star just collapses.

Yes. It would. Every penny that we spend determines not only matters of climate change, but all of reality.  

Coincidence is not causality.
That's the thing about WDS ... it makes you see things that are not there .... a theocratic hallucination.  A mirage. The remembrance of a favorite cartoon that was never actually made.

Americans in the United States are close enough to 50/50. But to be fair, you weren't speaking about Americans. I only responded to your claim about "the world."
Measuring stats from Gallup-style surveys can be very misleading, too, especially on a topic that varies so much by demographic (education, age and political ideology). 17 year old HS students in rural areas will have a different outlook than 18 year old college students in cities. Lack of worry can be a positive measure among some and a negative outlook of total despair among others. 
It's to be expected, in my opinion too, but it does not necessarily follow that these additional resources are due to climate change. There might have been a decision to devote more resources due to several other factors. And if funds for these purposes were to run out, it would also not follow that climate change disasters had diminished. 

Chuck Schumer.
Not me. My wife. She ran into him at some community college function and came across him unexpectedly. She was there for other reasons and probably had no idea that he was visiting.
She asked him about high taxes in New York--so high that reports are of many people fleeing the state.
He told him that yes, many do leave, however they come back later when retired. Why? For the services, he told her.
He did not seem to realize that that made the situation worse. They leave when they can put into the pot. They return when they can take from it.
There is a certain pundit known to @James Thomas Rook Jr. (I've never met him, by the way, otherwise he would top my list) who maintains that the most dangerous place in the world to be is between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.

All things change ... get used to it !
What used to be the sea bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, with all the fishes, large and small ... is now Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and States North.
With glaciers, what used to be the plains of what we now call Illinois and surrounding States is now the Great Lakes .
The mighty Mississippi River was relocated when the land tilted by Earthquakes.
At one time, the ENTIRE planet Earth was covered with two MILES of ice.  Before that,  molten lava 4,000 miles deep.
The Earth is slowing down its rotation about 2 milliseconds every hundred years, as the Moon gets further and further away, at about 1-1/2 inches per year.
I have in a bookcase here at home, a pie shaped section of a tree cut from a slice of a petrified tree that I bought in Arizona, where millions of trees lie on the ground, exposed by erosion, and it still has the rings and bark on the outside arc, replaced molecule by molecule, as the wood was replaced by minerals, and became stone. 
This tree fell to Earth in Nicaragua 283 MILLION years ago and at a small fraction of an inch per year was carried, with a whole forest of similar trees, by continental drift to what is now Arizona ..... where someone picked it up, cut it, and I bought it.
The Earth is changing. 
Always has .... always will.
What used to be jungles, are now deserts. What used to be deserts are now jungles.  What used to be flat plains are now mountains.
Mankind does not possess the ability to affect climate change ... one way or another.  Not to cause it. Not to change it. Not to stop it.
The only REAL greenhouse gas is water vapor ... a multi trillion ton collection of floating WATER. 
Clouds that circle the Earth, and float above  your head ... shiny on the top ... dark on the bottom ... covering continents,  nations and oceans.
And of course, that ever present fusion reactor in the sky, 93,000,000 miles away, our variable star called The Sun.
If we had a spasm total global thermonuclear war, setting the entire Earth on fire ... we would have a global nuclear winter for about four years, devastation almost beyond imagination.
And then ... rain would wash the pollutants out of the air and it would fall to Earth as acid rain ... and in about ten years, the climate would return to what it was ... as determined by our Star, the Sun, and orbital mechanics .... whatever it is.
Even with total global thermonuclear war, we cannot change the climate ... only the weather for about a decade.
All things change ... get used to it !
If the sea levels rise ......
buy a boat!
... or move !

I lived in Hollywood, California, up in the hills, on Pacific View Trail, for several years, and SAW several famous people, but had no interest in meeting them.
I did have a race with Paul Newman, on Pacific Coast Highway, me on a Honda 350 motorcycle and him driving a Limo, circa 1969. 
We pulled up at a stoplight in Malibu, grinned at each other. I revved up my motorcycle ... he revved up his Limo, and when the light turned green we both roared North.   
I got up to 45mph, and dropped back ... he disappeared into the distance..
But technically .... I did race against Paul Newman.
 

I lived in Hollywood, California, up in the hills, on Pacific View Trail, for several years, and SAW several famous people, but had no interest in meeting them.
I did have a race with Paul Newman, on Pacific Coast Highway, me on a Honda 350 motorcycle and him driving a Limo, circa 1969. 
We pulled up at a stoplight in Malibu, grinned at each other. I revved up my motorcycle ... he revved up his Limo, and when the light turned green we both roared North.   
I got up to 45mph, and dropped back ... he disappeared into the distance..
But technically .... I did race against Paul Newman.
 

Billy ..... you are the best I have ever seen at misapplying whatever anyone says.   You take someone's key words and misapply them to  fit your own agenda.
("Something missing from that fantasy of 283 million years of evolution....")
In this case, the word "erosion", which you have mentioned several times, and has NOTHING to do with this conversation.
This is a COMMON problem of ALL agenda driven thinking processes
I said the piece of petrified wood I have is 283 million years old ... NOT that mankind was 283 million years old.
When your ENTIRE thinking processes are controlled, governed, and shaped by AGENDA ... you can ignore a billion and more tons of HARD EVIDENCE.
Agenda driven thinking ALWAYS results in theocratic hallucinations.
Add that to negligible reading comprehension, and you live in a cartoon world, untouched by tawdry or magnificent reality.